Jack L. Gray

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Jack L. Gray (April 28, 1927-September 1981) was a Canadian artist.

Contents 1 Biography 1.1 Early life and education 1.2 Career 1.3 Death and afterward

[edit] Biography

[edit] Early life and education

Jack L. Gray was born in Halifax, Nova Scotia on 28 April 1927. As a schoolboy he loved drawing pictures, especially those of ships at sea, and his talent was recognized and encouraged by Wylie Greer. By the end of World War II he was a student at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, during the era of Donald McKay's tenure. Jack never completed his studies at NSCAD, but went out on sketching trips alone, and with his friend and former classmate Joseph Purcell. During the summer of 1947 these two artists rented the loft of a fish store at New Harbour NS and made many drawings and paintings. Gray travelled briefly to Montreal in 1948, to take a course from Arthur Lismer at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. But Jack's evident disinterest in Lismer's classroom sessions soon led to private discussions between the two artists, which proved very fruitful. In those years Jack Gray also spent several seasons at sea with the last of Lunenburg, Nova Scotia's dory-fishing schooner fleet, and amassed a portfolio of sketches, notes and photographs.

[edit] Career

He had his first major solo exhibition at the Hackmatack Inn in Chester, Nova Scotia in 1948, leading to several commissions. With subsequent patronage from Philadelphia dowager heiress Mary Dayton Cavendish as well as the brewery owner Colonel Sidney C. Oland and his family, Gray gradually advanced his career, living aboard boats in the early 1950's. An early friendship with author Thomas Head Raddall led to Gray's pen-and ink illustrations in Raddall's A Muster of Arms. Gray also painted a wartime scene of Duncan's Cove, Nova Scotia which was used for the dust jacket of that book.

In the mid 1950's Gray moved to New York, and initially painted on studios in boats in Flushing Bay. For a time represented by New York commercial galleries, Gray also lived in the Des Artistes flats in the Upper East Side. A body of work from this period later became a well-known series of reproductions, the New York Harbor Collection, which was, however never a complete set, as many of the significant canvas works from that period had already been sold. In 1958 an engagement overseas with a Hollywood production company took Gray to Spain, where he worked towards the posters for the film John Paul Jones.

By 1959 Gray was living in Winterport, Maine in an 18th-century Cape Cod, painting what later critics would characterize as his best work. But that Maine studio was short-lived, as Gray sold it in 1961 and moved to Halifax, purchasing a property on the Northwest Arm, with a dock for his boat.

At that same period, Gray was in negotiation with the New York press agency Peed & Gammon, who had arranged for Gray's canvas Dressing Down, the Gully to find its way into the hands of newly elected US president John F. Kennedy. This resulted in a July 1962 visit to the White House in Washington by Gray, including a chat with the president. Bids from many patrons and galleries rapidly ensued. Gray remained friends with Roland Gammon for years afterward. By 1965 the artist had moved back aboard a boat, in West Palm Beach, Florida, and began a relationship with galleries on Palm Beach's Worth Avenue that would remain in place for the rest of his life. Concurrently, Gray maintained a summer hideaway near Blue Rocks Nova Scotia, where he continued to sketch his favourite subject, inshore fishermen in small boats.

Throughout his adult years Gray was known as a witty raconteur and motorboat skipper, and later in his life often sailed across the Gulf Stream to the Bahamas. He was a frequent visitor to Miss Emily's Blue Bee Bar in New Plymouth, Green Turtle Cay.

[edit] Death and afterward

Gray's last years were troubled with health issues. He died after a long illness in West Palm Beach, in September 1981.

Following Gray's death, the value of his works, particularly those of the oil-on-canvas medium, skyrocketed. Art dealers hungry for "lost" works hunted contacts in Nova Scotia, Maine and Florida. Several forgeries appeared, and more than one work (including a high-profile canvas that was on prominent public display, in Halifax) was reported stolen. The artist's early sketchbooks, originally kept in chronological order, were separated by a Halifax dealer in the 1960s, and sold as individually framed drawings.